Introduction

For most people, it will be far easier to install a pre-built package for MythTV rather than building from source. Reasons for building from source include:

There is no pre-built package for your Linux distribution.

The pre-built package for your distribution is out of date.

You want to run a pre-release version of the software.

Users choose to test/write patches.

If you have already installed a pre-built package and you have a need to try out a source code change, it would be preferable to use your distribution's build process to build a version that is compatible with the already installed version. There are differences in the placement of files between the downloaded packages and the code you build yourself.

This guide shows how to build from source code downloaded from github.

Raspberry Pi

Starting from version 0.28 It is possible to build and run MythTV frontend on a Raspberry Pi 2 or Raspberry Pi 3. Since the Raspberry Pi has limited resources there are some steps you can take to ensure a successful build.

I strongly recommend using Raspbian rather than Ubuntu for building and running MythTV. Raspbian is optimized for multimedia and provides a more stable environment and better performance for applications that use OpenMAX and OpenGL ES.

Setting up a Raspberry Pi for building MythTV

Before attempting to build you should take these steps.

Install the operating system on an external USB hard drive.

Use a hard drive that has its own power supply. If you have an old hard drive around that you no longer use you can buy a USB enclosure for it. You need a hard drive of 50 GB or more.

These steps can be done on the Raspberry Pi itself but are easier if done from an desktop computer running Linux.

Install your Raspberry Pi operating system on an SD card as normal. If you are going to use the Raspberry Pi to prepare the hard drive you will need to prepare a second SD card. Make sure your SD cards boot correctly into the operating system.

Partition your hard drive. Create an ext4 partition of at least 50 GB for your operating system. I recommend using gparted. Format it as ext4 (gparted can do that for you).

Copy your SD card contents to the new hard drive partition. If you are using the Raspberry Pi to do this do not copy the SD card from which you are booted. You will need an SD card reader plugged into a USB port to read the SD card that you are copying from. Use lsblk to determine the device names. If you are running a Graphical environment it may automatically mount the devices. Otherwise mount them in an appropriate place. On the SD card you are copying from use the second partition (e.g. /dev/sda2).

sudo cp -av /source/directory/* /dest/directory/

Edit the /boot/cmdline.txt file on the SD card you are copying from. Change the parameter root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 to root=/dev/sda1. If you are not using the first partition on the hard drive change sda1 to the correct partition.

Edit the /etc/fstab file on the hard drive. Find the line for the root mount. Change the device name at the beginning of the line from /dev/mmcblk0p2 to /dev/sda1, or the correct hard drive partition.

Shut down your Raspberry Pi, insert the SD card you were copying from, and plug in the external hard drive. Make sure you do not have another drive or USB Card reader plugged in. The Raspberry Pi will now boot with the hard drive as root partition.

Swap space

I had previously recommended creating a large swap area. However it is far better to avoid swapping altogether, by limiting the build to 3 processes. Once the system starts swapping, performance becomes ridiculously poor.

Reduce GPU memory

Edit /boot/config.txt and comment out the gpu memory line when building

#gpu_mem=256

Setup ccache

After installing the prerequisites make sure there is enough ccache as follows

ccache -M 5G -F 0

With all of these steps in place, the first build of MythTV will take around 2 hours on a Raspberry Pi 2. Subsequent builds can take as little as 2 minutes. With ccache, even a full rebuild can complete in 10 minutes, because it caches the compiler results and if the source does not change it re-uses them.

Dependencies

One of the most difficult parts of building the code is getting the correct dependencies installed first. The syntax for installing these will vary from one distribution to another, and package names may also vary between distributions.

Installing Build Dependencies with Ansible

Mythtv now has Ansible playbooks to set up build dependencies. These support many Linux variants and will easily install your build dependencies. Follow the following steps to install build dependencies.

Install git using your distribution package system.

Follow steps described at https://github.com/MythTV/ansible. For MythTV version 0.28 onwards, use the option "For a normal development system running Qt5". For earlier versions use "For a normal development system running Qt4". All of the commands listed on that page must be run as root or with sudo. Note that 0.27 can run with either QT4 or QT5, and the choice will depend on what is available with your release of Linux.

Installing Build Dependencies without Ansible

It is recommended to use Ansible, because that will be kept up to date. Alternatively, to install the dependencies manually, follow these instructions.

Run Time Dependencies

If you are installing on a different computer from where you built, you will need the run time dependencies. You do not need the full list of build dependencies. Here is a list of runtime dependencies.

On jessie or Ubuntu prior to 16.04, the last 3 python packages may not be available. Leaving them out will only affect metadata lookup.

On systems where libcec4 is not available use libcec3 instead (code needs to have been build with libcec-dev in that case).

Run Time Dependencies for MythWeb

All Environments

apache2 php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

Ubuntu Xenial or where php5 is not available

apache2 php7 php7-mysql libhttp-date-perl

The package mysql-server only needs to be installed on one backend, normally the master backend, or it can be installed on a separate database server, although this would be unusual.

On systems that do not have mysql-server (e.g. remote frontends, slave backends), you need to install mysql-client instead.

Install the build dependencies on your build machine. Install the Run Time dependencies on your MythTV machine (which may be the same as the build machine). If you plan to use MythWeb, install those dependencies on your master backend system.

Distribution

Install Command

Additional packages

Ubuntu, Debian, MythBuntu, other Debian based distributions.

sudo apt-get install Dependency List

build-essential

Depending on your distribution, run the install command with the list of packages.

Getting and compiling the source code

Choose your version. The current stable released version is 29-fixes. We recommend to use that version.

git checkout fixes/29

If you have previously done a build in this directory, run this if you need a complete rebuild

git clean -xfd

In general, you should probably choose the stable version. If you don't mind if your MythTV system is non-functional or has serious bugs that may prevent proper operation/result in lost recordings or inability to play back recordings, you may try using the unstable, development code. If using unstable, development code, you should follow the mythtv-commits and mythtv-dev mailing lists.

Build and Install MythTV

In the ~/build/mythtv/mythtv directory, run the ./configure script. You can see available options by using the --help parameter with configure:

./configure --help

By default the build will install mythtv in a directory structure under /usr/local/. Executables will be in /usr/local/bin. You can modify this behavior with the --prefix= parameter. The default prefix is /usr/local.

Normally you will not need to supply any options to configure, although 0.27 users should add --disable-mythlogserver (mythlogserver). Run it as follows:

For building version Master or version 29 for Raspberry Pi, change --enable-openmax to --enable-omx-rpi.

If you want to build with debugging info, use --compile-type=profile. There are problems with using debug as the compile type.

The configure step may identify dependencies that are missing. If so you will need to find them and install them before continuing. Please let us know via an update to this page or make a comment in the discussion page.

If the configure was successful, run the build as follows

make -j 5

The -j option is optional but can speed up the make by running multiple processes at the same time. Set the number to 1 higher than the number of cores in your system.
For raspberry pi set the number to 3. Since the raspberry pi has limited memory, setting it to 5 can cause swapping and that will slow down the build considerably.
The build may identify missing dependencies. Install them and notify us via a comment in the discussion.
When the build is successful, install this way

sudo make install

This will install both backend and frontend software. Install this on all machines, backend or frontend. You will only start the backend on the backend machines. On frontend machines the backend software will exist but will not be used.

Build and Install Plugins

Building and installing the plugins is optional. I recommend that new users skip this step. Plugins are not needed for any of the main functionality of MythTV, including watching Videos and watching DVDs. Plugins are for Music, Weather, YouTube, Games, etc.

Plugins are only used on the frontend, so if you have a separate backend you need not install them on the backend.

The plugins build requires that you have first completed a build of mythtv and installed it. It makes use of some of the items set up in the mythtv configure step, and some of the items installed in the install step, so if you have cleaned your mythtv build, the plugins build will not work.

In the ~/build/mythtv/mythplugins directory, run the same commands as above for building and installing MythTV. If you only want to build certain plugins, you can disable the others in the ./configure command (check the --help for the syntax for that).

./configure
make -j 5
sudo make install

Shared-Library requirements for MythTV

The runtime manager for shared libraries, /lib/ld.so, gets information about the locations and contents of shared libraries from /etc/ld.so.cache, a file created by ldconfig from information in /etc/ld.so.conf. Because MythTV installs shared libraries in /usr/local/lib, that directory needs to be added to the list of directories for ld.so to search when doing runtime linking of programs, if it is not already there. You do this, as root, by editing /etc/ld.so.conf, then running ldconfig. There are many ways to do this; to determine the way that your distribution is configured, type:

cat /etc/ld.so.conf
cat /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*

Check if /usr/local/lib is included in the list displayed. If so then no action is needed.

If /usr/local/lib is not already included, then create as root a file under /etc/ld.so.conf.d that contains a line containing

/usr/local/lib

Make sure that /etc/ld.so.conf contains a line as follows

include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf

To ensure the cache has been updated, run this command:

sudo /sbin/ldconfig

Test Setup

Instead of setting up the shared library cache as described above, if you have customized the location of the libraries using for example ./configure --prefix=/home/peter/work/mythtv, you can install and run the backend and frontend in your home directory by setting the path of the lib files as follows:

update the lines setenv db_server, setenv db_name, setenv db_login, setenv db_password to contain the correct database info. If you plan to use the default settings, leave as is, otherwise choose new settings, to match what you will use when setting up the database. See MythTV Database Setup below.

the database and backend must be running for MythWeb to work. At this point you have not yet set up the database or the backend so you cannot try MythWeb. Once those things have been set up and are running, test MythWeb by navigating to http://servername/mythweb where servername is your master backend server on which mythweb is running. If running from a different system you may have to add servername plus its ip address to your /etc/hosts file.

For more advanced and detailed instructions on MythWeb see the file mythweb/INSTALL in the download from github.

Post-install tasks

After installing the software there are a number of steps that must be taken before you have a working environment. If you installed from a pre-built package these would be done automatically.

Creating the mythtv user

MythTV backend needs to run as its own user. This should be a system account. Create a user as follows:

sudo useradd --system mythtv

Users might want to add --groups cdrom,audio,video to the above.

MythTV Database Setup

Run these commands from the command line. The mysql command will prompt for your root database password, which you would have supplied during mysql installation. The mysql daemon must be running.

Ignore warnings like "Warning: Unable to load '/usr/share/zoneinfo/iso3166.tab' as time zone. Skipping it.".

Run mythtv-setup. This will automatically create your database or upgrade your previous mythconverg database schema to the latest version:

mythtv-setup

If config.xml has not been created, setup will prompt for database info. You can then continue with setting up your system in mythtv-setup.

If there are problems with the database, see the article Database Setup.

Before you can get the backend to start up and stay running, you have to configure at least one capture card correctly, plus one video source and connect these with an input. See Configuring_MythTV. Note that if you had installed the Ubuntu pre-built package there would not be this restriction, the backend can run without any configuration being done.

Backend Startup

For MythTV to be able to schedule and make recordings, the backend must be running at the time of the scheduled recordings. Normally this means running the backend at all times while the server is running. It should be set up to be automatically started when the server starts. This is handled automatically for you in the pre-built packages, but if you are building it yourself you have to set up some mechanism. Possible ways of doing it are systemd, Upstart, init script, /etc/rc.local. Ubuntu packages run it from Upstart (but is likely to switch to systemd in 16.04), which has the ability to restart the process if it fails.

The simplest way will be by editing the rc.local. Use gksudo gedit to edit rc.local and add the following line:

/usr/local/bin/mythbackend -d --logpath /tmp/ --user mythtv

This is a very basic and simplistic approach, but will work. For a reliable system you need to use something more advanced like Upstart. If you install from the Ubuntu or MythBuntu package the Upstart setup is done for you. Also you should create a directory other than /tmp/ for your logs. /var/log/mythtv is the popular location. Note that whatever directory you create for logs must be writeable by the mythtv user as well as frontend users. The frontend user if your normal Linux login, which you will use for viewing MythTV.

You can get a list of options available with mythbackend by running mythbackend --help.

If the backend starts up before you have added any capture cards it will immediately shut down again. Proceed to Configuring MythTV and complete the configuration up to the point of setting up a capture card, a video source and an input connection, before trying to start it again.

Next Steps

At this point you need to perform the configuration steps. See the table of contents and proceed to Configuring_MythTV and then Configuring_Frontend. Until you have done that you will not be able to do anything useful with MythTV.